Springboard

With today’s marketers setting aside an average 9% of their total marketing budgets for innovation, it’s clear that innovation plays an important part of brands’ marketing and research strategies. That being said, however, with many businesses tightening and cutting back on their marketing and research budgets following the Great Recession, that 9% has become less and less valuable over the past few years. As brands continue to get used to the “new normal” of today’s recovering economy, they need to be cautious with limited resources while they work to remain relevant. Tighter budgets and fewer employees are forcing innovators to think smarter and make resource-conscious changes that will allow them to accomplish more with less. In today’s ultra competitive environment, failing to move forward with disruptive innovation strategies can be a killer blow to your brand’s long-term success, but thankfully there are some cost-effective solutions to help any brand looking to innovate on a budget.

Several weeks ago, the FDA proposed changes to the Nutrition Facts label that we’re all so used to seeing throughout grocery store aisles. It’s been heavily discussed and we know these changes will more than likely be coming our way, so let’s understand together how to make it work.

In our last post, How Will New Communication Norms Change Consumer Research, we took a look at how social media is substantially affecting how people communicate, from the language they use, to the time they devote to online interaction, to the manners (or lack of) they exhibit online. Our takeaway from those observations was that researchers need to consider these evolving communication norms as they design studies, recognizing that research design must constantly adapt to the changing ways people communicate, think, interact, and solve problems. Stay tuned as the best minds in our industry continue to observe and share their observations and emerging insights.

You’d think that today could be considered the golden era of marketing research, especially for consumer insights. There’s never been a time in the history of civilization when consumers have had so many ways to offer their point of view, feedback, suggestions for improvements or ideas for new products.

Do you remember your first focus groups as a marketing professional? Whether they took place 5,10, 25, or 40 years ago, odds are the events were markedly similar.

Business historians generally give credit to sociologist Robert Merton who, in 1941 as associate director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, conducted the first focus group. He actually called it a “focused interview,” which a few years later became a focus group. The point is that this method has been around for more than 70 years, and many good researchers continue to use focus groups in much the same way Merton did back during WWII.